Saturday, 28 January 2017

“Open
Sesame” was the magical phrase that a poor woodcutter Ali Baba uttered, to open
the door of a secret cave in which 40 thieves had hidden bags of gold and
treasure. The power of his voice, and using the right words, gave him access to
that fortune, and changed his life forever.

We are in the same
cusp of open sesame to Digital Transformation and changing our lives. It’s a
fact that our lives are becoming more digital. We buy, we work, we store
information, and we even communicate with other people through media and
digital platforms.

A laptop was not an item in my
life until the age of 35, whereas for my daughters, they have always had a
laptop in the house, and learned how to use it, earlier than me.

Whether we like it or not, digital transformation is creating a new era…
changing how we do things, how we live … and we are already fully immersed into
it. We have a great opportunity to be more effective, efficient, fast and
agile.

We, as consumers
expect ultra-connected experiences. Whether it’s in-store, on the web, using a
mobile device or through wearables, we want every interaction to be simple, effortless,
relevant and lightning fast.

The Internet of Things have already started changing our lives!! The connected carwe use may know the
temperature we like at home so adjust accordingly. The mobile app is connected
with all Smart Home devices to alert us of anything suspicious happening while
we are away. It can notify when we approach grocery store, of the items we need
at home. With Drones, we can get a tour of properties listed so we can choose the
right one.

To
reach 50 million users, radio took 38 years, Google took 6 years, and Google+
needed just 88 days while Smartphone “Pokémon Go” game reached that count in
just 19 days!!

Our
lives have become a collection of mobile moments in which we pull out a mobile
device as if it was a magic wand to get something done wherever and whenever we
want. We
use smartphones for more than just making phone calls. From online banking to posting
family photos to social media, sending e-mails and text messages, searching for
restaurants and booking movies.

We are alerted of our days’ appointments and
meetings before even we had our breakfast. A weather app alerts us of the rain
forecast. To make our commute pleasant, the built-in GPS in our car alerts us
of upcoming traffic along the planned route and suggests an alternative route
so we can get to work on time and keep our meetings.

All of
us have become so health conscious with wearables like Apple watch & activity
trackers like Fit bit and Jawbone and Google smart contact lenses etc. With
wearables like Oculus Rift VR, we can enter into an exciting new realm of
augmented reality, with an enhanced experience of what we see, hear and touch.

Big Data Analytics is
an ideal entry point to get into digital transformation. It is like turning the lights on in a dark
room. Every interaction we have with businesses, point-of-sale transaction
details, loyalty card information, surveys, and social media postings to Facebook,
Twitter, Pinterest, and more.. which provides deep insight into our behavior,
attitudes, and opinions that businesses are leveraging to improve relationships
with hyper-personalization.

Voila! Life is simplified …..

Was this all
available to us 20 years before? Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame” was a story of
childhood, but Digital Transformation is reality – and from now on nothing will
be same again.

Sunday, 22 January 2017

Today,
with Digitization of everything, 80 percent the data being created is
unstructured.

Audio, Video, our social footprints, the data generated from
conversations between customer service reps, tons of legal document’s texts
processed in financial sectors are examples of unstructured data stored in Big Data.

Organizations
are turning to natural language processing (NLP) technology to derive
understanding from the myriad of these unstructured data available online and in
call-logs.

Natural
language processing (NLP) is the ability of computers to understand human speech
as it is spoken.NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that has many important implications on the ways that computers
and humans interact. Machine Learning has helped computers parse the ambiguity
of human language.

Apache
OpenNLP, Natural Language Toolkit(NLTK), Stanford NLP are various open source
NLP libraries used in real world application below.

Here
are multiple ways NLP is used today:

The
most basic and well known application of NLP is Microsoft Word spell checking.

Text
analysis, also known as sentiment analytics is a key use of NLP. Businesses are
most concerned with comprehending how their customers feel emotionally adn use that data for betterment of their service.

Email
filters are another important application of NLP. By analyzing the emails that
flow through the servers, email providers can calculate the likelihood that
an email is spam based its content by using Bayesian or Naive based spam filtering.

Call
centers representatives engage with customers to hear list of specific complaints and
problems. Mining this data for sentiment can lead to incredibly actionable
intelligence that can be applied to product placement, messaging, design, or a
range of other use cases.

Google
and Bing and other search systems use NLP to extract terms from text to
populate their indexes and to parse search queries.

Google Translate applies machine translation technologies in not only translating words, but in understanding the meaning of sentences to
provide a true translation.

Many
important decisions in financial markets use NLP by taking plain text
announcements, and extracting the relevant info in a format that can be
factored into algorithmic trading decisions. E.g. news of a merger
between companies can have a big impact on trading decisions, and the speed at
which the particulars of the merger, players, prices, who acquires who, can be
incorporated into a trading algorithm can have profit implications in the
millions of dollars.

Since
the invention of the typewriter, the keyboard has been the king of
human-computer interface. But today with voice recognition via virtual assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Now, Apple’s Siri and
Microsoft’s Cortana respond to vocal prompts and do everything from finding a
coffee shop to getting directions to our office and also tasks like turning on
the lights in home, switching the heat on etc. depending on how digitized and
wired-up our life is.

Sunday, 15 January 2017

Analytics and Big Data have disrupted many
industries, and now they are on the edge of scoring major points in sports. Over
the past few years, the world of sports has experienced an explosion in the use
of analytics

Till few years back experience, gut
feelings, and superstition have traditionally shaped the decision making
process in sports.

It is first started with Oakland
Athletics' General Manager, Billy Beane, who applied analytics for selecting
right players. This was the first known use of statistics and
data to make decisions in professional sports.

Today, every major professional sports
team either has an analytics department or an analytics expert on staff. From coaches and players to front offices and
businesses, analytics can make a difference in scoring touchdowns, signing
contracts or preventing injuries.

Big name organizations such as the
Chicago Cubs, and Golden State Warriors are realizing that this is the future
of sports and it is in their best interest to ride the wave while everyone else
is trying to learn how to surf.

Golden State Warriors, have similarly
used big data sets to help owners and coaches recruit players and execute game
plans.

SportVu has six cameras installed in
the NBA arenas to track the movements of every player on the court and the
basketball 25 times per second. The data collected provides a plethora of
innovative statistics based on speed, distance, player separation and ball
possession to improve next games.

Adidas miCoach app works by having
players attach a wearable device to their jerseys. Data from the device shows
the coach who the top performers are and who needs rest. It also provides
real-time stats on each player, such as speed, heart rate and acceleration.

Patriots developed a mobile app called
Patriots Game Day Live, available to anyone attending a game at Gillette
Stadium.With this app, they are trying to predict
the wants and needs of fans, special content to be delivered, in-seat concession ordering and
bathroom wait times.

FiveThirtyEight.com, provides details
into more than just baseball coverage. It has over 20 journalists crunching numbers for fans to gain a better understanding of an upcoming game,
series or season.

Motus’ new sleeves for tracking a
pitcher’s throwing motion, measuring arm stress, speed and shoulder rotation.
The advanced data generated from this increases a player’s health,
performance and career. Experts can now predict with greater confidence if and
when a pitcher with a certain throwing style will get injured.

In the recent Cricket world cup, every team had its own team of Data Analysts. They
used various technologies like Cloud Platform and visualizations to
predict scores, player performance, player profiles and more. Around 40 years’
worth of Cricket World Cup data is being mined to produce insights that enhances the viewer's experience.

Analytics can advance the sports fans'
experience as teams and ticket vendors compete with the at-home experience --
the better they know their fans, the better they can cater to them.

This collection of data is also used
for internet ads, which can help with the expansion and growth of your
organization through social media platforms or websites.

What would be the most profitable food served at the
concession stand?

What would be the best prices to sell
game day tickets?

Determine which player on the team is
the most productive?

Which players in the draft will become
all-stars, and which ones will be considered role players?

Understand the fans behavior at the
stadium via their app and push relevant information accordingly.

In this Digital age, Analytics are the present and future of
professional sports. Any team that does not apply them to the fullest is at a
competitive disadvantage.

Sunday, 8 January 2017

Today’s
organizations are feeling the fear of becoming dinosaur every day. New
disrupters are coming into your industry and turning everything upside down.

Customers are more
demanding than ever and will abandon the service that is too slow to
respond. Everything is needed yesterday to make your customers happy.

Now, there is no
time for organizations to implement huge enterprise applications which takes
months and years.

What they need is, more agile, smaller, hyper focused teams
working together to innovate and provide customer value.

This is where
Microservices have gain momentum and are becoming fast go-to solution for
enterprises. They takes SOA a step further by breaking every component
into effectively single-purpose applications.

Microservices, show
a strategy for decomposing a large project, based on the functions, into
smaller, more manageable pieces. While a monolithic app is One Big Program with
many responsibilities, Microservice based apps are composed of several small
programs, each with a single responsibility

Microservices are
independently developed & deployable, small, modular services. Each
component is developed separately, and the application is then simply the sum
of its constituent components. Each service runs as a unique process and
communicates with other components via a very lightweight methods like
HTTP/Rest with Jason.

Unlike old single
huge enterprise application which requires heavy maintenance, Microservices are
easy to manage.

Here are few
characteristics and advantages of Microservices:

Very small, targeted in
scope and functionality

Gives developers the freedom to
independently develop and deploy services

Loosely coupled & can communicate with other services on
industry wide standards like HTTP and JSON

API based connectivity

Every service can be coded in different programming language

Easily deployable and disposable makes releases possible even
multiple times a day

So, if your IT
organization is implementing a microservices architecture, here are some
examples of an operating system (Linux, Ubuntu, CoreOS), container
technology(Docker), a scheduler(Swarm, Kubernetes), and a monitoring
tool(Prometheus).

The technical
demands of digital transformation, all front/back-office systems that
seamlessly coordinate customer experiences in a digital world is achieved by
Microservices as the preferred architecture.

Microservices help close the gap between business and IT & are
fundamental shift in how IT approaches software development and are absolutely
essential in Digital Transformation.